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Sycophant-in-Chief

Clarence Brown

Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg by Joshua Rubenstein
Tauris, 482 pp, £19.50, July 1996, ISBN 1 85043 998 2

In 1966, the year I made the acquaintance of Ilya Ehrenburg, these words appeared in the Daily Mirror: ‘His name is always mud – somewhere or other. He is Ilya Ehrenburg, the renowned Soviet writer, who has shouldered the lifelong burden of always being blamed by somebody, somewhere, for something.’ Joshua Rubenstein shows flair in taking this as the epigraph for his book, and so acknowledging the magnitude of his task.